Ok. My writing for anyone other than myself hiatus may be over. Good grief that went on much longer than planned. Actually, it wasn’t planned at all. It was more of a falling. I lost traction on my life and slipped off into tunnel vision, moment to moment survival, a hollow, desolate, uninspired terrain. I think maybe my life started laughing at me for thinking I knew anything at all and decided to serve up some big lessons regarding best laid plans and sense of self.

I have spent the last month and a half looking at my life from a distance. Trying to get a new perspective on the big picture even while I have mostly been trying to make it through one nauseating moment to the next. I have been in process with myself. Which isn’t unusual it’s just that I generally am a very out loud processor and am shit at keeping that to myself and well I just haven’t been quite ready to share the ins and the outs just yet. The caveat of course is that I generally transform through revelation and if I am holding all my cards close to my chest there is not much revelation to be had. Just a lot of digesting. But I am a truth teller and the act of wallowing in the mire of secrets is at best somewhat destructive for me.

So here it is, I suppose. Or the beginning at least. Incomplete. Imperfect.

I think, for the most part, I have always known that I have 3 kids. Maybe that’s weird, but it is simply just how it has always felt to me. I love Maple and Eider with my whole heart and while we are absolutely complete, there has always been another one nudging in from the periphery. Just about 5 years ago, Chris and I became pregnant by chance. At the worst possible time in our marriage to welcome in a 3rd. So we made the decision not to continue with the pregnancy for the sake of our relationship and healing and wholeness. Even in its rightness, I bear the pain of that choice always. The following year, we conceived again, but it was complicated and unclear in its own way and I wound up miscarrying at the end of the first trimester. This piece expresses some of that.

Running along side of this all is an on-going interest that I have long had in local foster-care and adoption. As well as my keen dislike of actually being pregnant. As well as the fact that I am not a spring chicken anymore. But instead of making any definitive decisions, we shelved it for a year. Mostly because Chris was really content with 2 and I was tired. I worked on moving on. I focused on all that I have and on making our lives as full and vibrant as possible. But the pervasive sense of this 3rd person just never quit. So in June of 2016 we began trying in earnest. Much to Chris’ chagrin and in many ways, my dismay.

And, well, we did that for a long time. I went to acupuncture regularly to support my fertility. I sought out unending counsel and support. I tracked everything. I spent months taking ovulation prediction tests and never once got a positive one. I pretty much started to believe that I was closed for business and that the only way that our kid was coming was not going to be by biological means. And I was fine with that. Chris was a little reluctant to take definitive action in a different direction- I think perhaps he was hoping we could just stay forever in that space of non-action and no results. But I think together we were letting go and loosening a bit around how we thought things would unfold.

Around the same time as we were beginning to lean into this letting go, we lost our friend, one of Chris’ closest guys for his entire adulthood, his primary inspiration in fatherhood and parenting. I processed that a ton this fall in this space. At any rate, it caused a shift in Chris, and he became much more clear on the expanding nature of a parents love. We moved into a new space of really being on the same page in ways that we hadn’t on this particular topic in years.

But I was all dried up! And pregnancy is a miserable slog for me! So we began to craft in earnest a plan for opening our home to a child who maybe needed us and whom we most certainly needed. And in the momentum of this, I began to do all sorts of things that I hadn’t done in years because I had been hoping to conceive. I certainly stopped charting my cycle. Thank god. I made not one but two long range tattoo appointments. I finally posted a piece that I had been sitting on for years thinking I’d post it when I conceived. Ha! I let go. I let go. And I moved on. I did exactly what people had been telling me to do for years but what I learned on the way is that letting go feels a lot like becoming something else and getting over some of the parts that were inherent in what you were before. It is a changing. At a deep and fundamental level.

So, what happened instead is I turned 41, I missed my period- which I had no idea of until my adolescent daughter who I am all synced up with told me I had- and I peed on a stick thinking “what are the fucking odds now???”

After some initial reeling, I’ve been re-grouping. Despite being just under 12 weeks and not in the clear as of yet- or, um, ever?- I’m sharing what’s up here so that I can hopefully free something up inside of myself that has been feeling stuck and disconnected. I guess it is a gesture of reclaiming authenticity in my new skin that I wasn’t planning on ever wearing again. It is so much more complicated than I anticipated. And I am not just referring to the ins and outs of being of “advanced maternal age”, even though that comes with a lot more complexity than being pregnant at 27 or 30 to be sure! I am like a human pin cushion, poked, prodded, constantly tested in search of something wrong. (Something must be wrong, right?!?) No. Complicated on a soul level. I am re-routing inside myself. Changing shape in my physical to be sure, but even more so within my inner landscape. And like I said way back when at the beginning of this post- thanks for sticking with me if you have!- I have been looking at my whole life from more of a distance. Tracking myself through time and space and making sense of old thoughts and impressions and the ways that they’ve evolved over time within me. Changing me so slowly over such a long stretch of time that I am somehow new inside myself. The same and yet wholly different.

OK. Thanks for making it through. I still have some hurdles to jump through before I can be certain of this baby, but I feel pretty certain…. if not a bit tentative still. Soon. Soon. But it feels better to let myself be seen instead of bidding my time. My path has always called me back to telling the whole truth and this is no exception I suppose. In the meantime, I do feel glimmers of my creative life taking root again inside of me and I hope to share more of that here soon. Life as ever is moving and expanding and there is so very much to take note of.

PRACTICE

I like to write. Historically, in fits and starts. More and more as of late, because it’s a practice, after all. I am interested in whatever helps me to engage in a life of practice and if this works, so be it. Maybe I am just using this space as another opportunity to hold myself accountable to the path. I might write about yoga. I'll probably write a lot about my kids and what insights arise in my day to day of being their mother. And I'll reflect on my own process, in one of the many domains that I find myself traversing: woman, mama, partner, student, friend, daughter, sister, teacher. I also want to take and post pictures here that are meaningful to me. Images have often made more sense to me than words anyway. My guess it that it will all circle back around to the yoga in the end. It generally does.